landscape and sticking his inquiring
ears over various spots on the horizon. In four and a half months I
think I must have seen at least a hundred thousand kongoni.

The giraffe is also a creature of most amusing actions. You are pretty
certain to see a bunch of them as you come up the railway from the
coast. They were the first wild animals I saw in British East Africa--a
group of four or five quietly feeding within only a hundred yards of the
thundering railway engine. They were in the protected area, however, and
seemed to know that no harm would reach them there. Later on in the
morning we saw other herds, but invariably at long range, sometimes
teetering along the sky line or appearing and disappearing behind the
flat-topped umbrella acacias.

[Drawing: _They Run Loosely but Earnestly_]

The giraffe is most laughable when in action. He first looks at you,
then curls his tail over his back, and then lopes off with head and neck
stuck out, and with body and legs slowly folding and unfolding in a most
ungainly stride. It is hard to describe the gait of a giraffe to one who
has never seen it, but any one would at once know without being told
that a giraffe couldn't help being funny when running.

As a general thing it is difficult to approach a giraffe. With their
keen eyes and great height they almost invariably see you before you see
them, and that will be at seven or eight hundred yards' distance. From
the moment they see you they never lose sight of you unless it is when
they disappear behind a hill a mile or two away.

When seen on the sky-line a herd of giraffe will suggest a line of
telegraph poles; when seen scattered along a hillside, partly sheltered
under the trees, they blend into the mottled lights and shadows in such
a way as to be almost invisible. I have been within two hundred yards of
a motionless giraffe and, although looking directly at it, was not aware
that it was a giraffe until it moved. It might easily have been mistaken
for a bare fork of the tree, with the mottled shadows of the leaves cast
upon it.

Along the Tana River I saw several herds of giraffe, perhaps fifty head
in all, but it was on the great stretches of the scrub country that
slopes down from Mount Elgon that I saw the great herds of them. One
afternoon I saw twenty-nine together, big black males, beautifully
marked tawny females, and lots of little ones that loomed up like lamp
posts amidst a group of telegraph poles. With